| IT was definitely time for me to go, but it would scarcely be good manners to leave without saying farewell to my fiancée. The following afternoon, after making a few preparations, I went for a stroll with Fainting Maid and her father. Henpecked Ho was rather surprised when I took the path toward the old well beside the bricked up patch in the wall. | 1 |
| "Roses! My favorite flowers!" squealed Fainting Maid, pointing to some petunias. | 2 |
| "Beautiful roses indeed, but as Chang Chou has so charmingly pointed out, women are the only flowers that can talk," I cooed. "The loveliest flowers in the world fade beside the glory of a beautiful woman, particularly when the light strikes her properly. Stop!" I cried. "0 my beloved, stop right here with your exquisite little feet against this mark on the path, for here the light is perfect, and never has your beauty been more breathtaking!" | 3 |
| Fainting Maid posed prettily. | 4 |
| "Perfection!" I gasped. "A lovely lady in a lovely setting - one can scarcely believe that such a serene spot could have been the scene of a tragedy, yet I have heard that here a door was locked and a key was taken, and a handsome young man and the girl who loved him lost their lives." | 5 |
| "A stupid soldier and a slut," sneered Fainting Maid. | 6 |
| "A stupid soldier indeed. Why, it was almost certain that he was to marry you, 0 vision of perfection, yet he dared to prefer a lowly dancing girl. He even gave her a valuable jade pendant, which should rightfully have been yours, as a token of his love. Odd that they did not find it when they pulled the girl's body from the well," I said. "I mean she would scarcely have bothered to remove it before jumping to a watery death. Of course, somebody may have hired some goons to give her a little help." | 7 |
| I grabbed the gold chain around Fainting Maid's neck and jerked out the jade pendant that I had seen in the carriage. I had seen it again in ghost form, around the neck of Bright Star. | 8 |
| "Tell me, my precious, do you always wear this pretty trinket right next to your sweet little heart?" I purred. | 9 |
| Henpecked Ho was gazing at his loathsome daughter with shock and revulsion and imminent murder written all over his face, and Fainting Maid decided that I was safer. | 10 |
| "Surely you do not mean to suggest--" | 11 |
| "Ah, but I do!" | 12 |
| "You cannot possibly suspect--" | 13 |
| "Wrong again." | 14 |
| "0, thou hast slain me!" wailed Fainting Maid as she clutched her heart and staggered two feet backward and six to the left. | 15 |
| "Certain sticklers for accuracy might tend to agree with you," I muttered. Then I turned to her father. "Ho, you are perfectly free to hear whatever you want, of course, but what I hear is a magpie which is imitating the sounds of a scream and a splash." | 16 |
| "Clever little creature," said Henpecked Ho. "Now it is even imitating somebody yelling 'Help! Help!'" | 17 |
| "How on earth does the little magpie produce such effects?" I said admiringly. "That thrashing-in-the-water sound! The gurgle that sounds for all the world like someone descending to the bottom of a deep pool!" | 18 |
| "Nature is full of the most remarkable talents. Yours, for example," said Henpecked Ho. | 19 |
| "There is a slight flaw in my character," I said modestly. "And now I think that I shall erase the mark on the path, lest some busybody wonder why it is precisely two steps in front and six steps to the right of an old well." | 20 |
| "From which someone has rashly removed the cover," said Henpecked Ho. "Ready?" | 21 |
| "Ready." | 22 |
| The grief-stricken father and the bridegroom-that-now-would-never-be raced back toward the mansion, rending their garments and tearing out hair by the handful. | 23 |
| "WOE!" we screamed. "WOE! WOE! WOE! POOR FAINTING MAID HAS FALLEN INTO A WELL!" | 24 |
| All in all it was a very successful afternoon. | 25 |
| An odd thing happened when we fished Fainting Maid from the bottom of the old well. Her limp hand fell into mine, and something passed from her fingers to the palm of my hand. I was giving a magnificent performance and I made the most of it. | 26 |
| "Look!" I wailed. "Our love is immortal, for even in death my fiancée brings me a gift!" | 27 |
| "I would change 'even in' to 'only in'," Henpecked Ho muttered. "Never gave anybody anything in her life." | 28 |
| The object was encrusted with algae. I dried it off and dropped it in my pocket and forgot about it. | 29 |
| The arrangements were made in a few days. As the bereaved fiancé it was my duty to escort the coffin containing the body of my beloved to her final resting place in the family vaults at the palace of the Ancestress in Tsingtao, taking a barge downriver to Ch'in, and hiring a boat for the last stage of the journey. Henpecked Ho and I parted rather tearfully. He sadly surveyed the unspeakable Ancestress, his gabbling wife and her seven fat sisters, and he said: | 30 |
| "Dear boy, in your strolls around the estate did you happen to discover any more old wells?" | 31 |
| "I would advise using an axe," I said. | 32 |
| "An axe. Yes, an axe by all means. Chop-chop!" said Henpecked Ho. | 33 |
| The boatmen pushed off into the current. I waved goodbye to the old scholar, and as he dwindled in the distance I could faintly hear him chanting: "Chop-chop! Chop-chop-chop-chop-chop!" Then the barge swept around a bend in the river, and I retired to my cabin to get drunk. | 34 |
| I sat down on the couch and felt something in my pocket and pulled it out. It was the object Fainting Maid had brought up from the bottom of the well, and I began cleaning off the algae between swigs of strong wine. I felt wonderful. I opened the curtains and sang: | 35 |
| "The wind blows from the north, then it shifts to the south. I blink - and we've traveled from the Yellow Fields to Hsieh's Lake. The shadow of a mountain floats past my cabin; I lift the curtain and see purple cliffs. I pour two cups of clear wine, then open the cabin door. Here are ten thousand wrinkled mountains that no one ever sees, the highlights picked out for me by the setting sun." | 36 |
| The object was a locket. A very ancient locket, and quite pretty: a green jade dragon winding through holes in red coral. There was a rusted metal catch, and after more cleaning I was able to open it. The inner chamber was empty, but there were three small grooves that had been designed to hold something-or-other. I remembered that I had a silver chain in my luggage, so I attached the locket and hung it around my neck. Somehow it felt as though it belonged there. I opened another jar of wine. | 37 |
| "The fisherman poles his boat across Hsieh's Lake. My eyes watch him closely, until he does something strange: he turns into a wild goose, standing on a reed." | 38 |
| Even as I sang I felt something tugging at a corner of my mind. Turns into a wild goose, standing on a reed... | 39 |
| Yes. That drunken night at the Pool of Past Existences. I had been looking at a branch of a tree, and it had turned into a man. The hallucination wore an old-fashioned wide-sleeved robe and a tall Confucian hat, and it looked down at me with strange shining eyes and said: "I am going to send you to a dragon. You must follow the dragon." | 40 |
| I lifted the locket and looked at it again. A green jade dragon, winding through holes in red coral. | 41 |
| Five hundred years ago, the peasants said, the soldiers of the Duke of Ch'in caught up with the great Chang Heng when he was drinking from a well not twenty miles from his academy. Five hundred years later, I thought, Fainting Maid came up from the bottom of an old well not twenty miles from the Academy of Chang Heng and dropped a dragon locket into my hand. I had a sudden vision of a man with a wide-sleeved robe and a tall Confucian hat watching some soldiers ride up, and taking a locket from around his neck and dropping it into the well... | 42 |
| "Nonsense!" I snorted. | 43 |
| Night had fallen rapidly, and it had begun to rain. A thin rain from thin clouds playing tag with the moon. I polished off a fifth and sixth jar of wine. | 44 |
| "It is raining; the curtain blocks my view. I raise it, and the scene becomes even more beautiful. Tall pines stand like writing brushes on the bank, their cold reflections rippling into snakes. Then a silver mirror floats out of the clouds, and rays of moonlight glitter on the jade sand. I lean out the window and gaze into the distance at range after range of moon-swept mountains." | 45 |
| I lay back on my couch and closed my eyes. The rain pattered rhythmically upon the cabin roof: follow the dragon, it whispered, follow the dragon, follow the dragon, follow the dragon... | 46 |
| "Nonsense!" I yawned, and then I rolled over on my side and fell asleep. | 47 |
|